Through winter and spring, the Catholic crisis seemed
to be breaking into local bits and pieces. As compiled by the indispensable
“Poynteronline Abuse Tracker” (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=46),
it was a trial here, a settlement there, and the odd statement by a bishop.

And in the run-up to their annual June get-together in
St. Louis, there was every indication that the bishops meant to keep it that
way. The meetings were arranged to keep public discussion of sexual abuse in
the church to a bare minimum, so as to offer swarming reporters no
opportunity to construct any national story other than “bishops getting back
to business.”

It didn’t quite turn out that way.

In a June 12 interview with Larry Stammer of the Los
Angeles Times, former Oklahoma governor Frank Keating, the chairman of
the bishops’ National Review Board, launched a salvo across the episcopal
bow, with special notice to the cardinal archbishop of Los Angeles, Roger
Mahony.

“I have seen an underside that I never knew existed,” Keating said. “I have
not had my faith questioned, but I certainly have concluded that a number of
serious officials in my faith have very clay feet. That is disappointing and
educational, but it’s a fact…. To act like La Cosa Nostra and hide and
suppress, I think, is very unhealthy.” And then: “I think there are a number
of bishops—and I put Cardinal Mahony in that category—who listen too much to
his lawyer and not enough to his heart.”

The next day Mahony fired back, telling Stammer that
Keating’s comments were “off the wall.”

“All I can say is, from the bishops I've listened
to—and several called me this morning—this is the last straw,” he continued.
“To make statements such as these—I don’t know how he can continue to have
the support of the bishops. I don’t know how you back up from this.”

Other members of the commission allowed as how they
found Keating’s comments “unhelpful” and on June 16, after a majority
indicated that he should resign, he did. But he declined to assume the role
of penitent, stating instead: “My remarks, which some bishops found
offensive, were deadly accurate.” The media were inclined to agree.

In June 18 editorial, “Keating tells it like it is,” the Boston Herald
applauded him for not going quietly and expressed the hope that he would be
succeeded by someone “equally dogged, equally independent.” Comparable
support came from Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, and the
Dallas Morning News. Cartoonists had a field day, not least the
Hartford Courant’s Bob Englehart, who portrayed a couple of miter-headed
hit men consigning Keating to the fishes.

Meanwhile, on the evening of June 14 Bishop Thomas
O’Brien of Phoenix was driving home from a confirmation ceremony when he
struck and killed a jaywalker—and drove off without reporting the incident.
According to Joseph A. Reaves of the Arizona Republic, O’Brien had
been close to despair. In May, he signed an extraordinary agreement with the
Maricopa County Attorney, admitting in exchange for immunity from
prosecution that he had systematically covered up sexual abuse by priests
under his supervision.

The cops booked O’Brien on June 16. On June 17, he was
charged. On June 18, the Vatican, acting with unaccustomed alacrity,
accepted his resignation. In case anyone missed the metaphorical import of a
bishop leaving a victim dead in the street, David Gibson, the author of a
new book on the church, spelled it out for Newsday’s Carol Eisenberg:
“It plays into people’s sense that the hierarchy has done a hit-and-run on
the entire Catholic Church.”

To replace O’Brien, Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara suggested
that the bishops nominate Frank Keating. “Has the hapless hierarchy of the
American Catholic Church,” she asked, “ever needed a straight talker more
than now?”

The crisis, in short, was back at the top of the news
when the bishops arrived in St. Louis June 20. Frustrated, they stuck to
their pre-arranged agenda, lashed out at the media, and decamped with their
credibility as impaired as ever.

What righted the ship, at least momentarily, was the
Vatican’s July 1 announcement of Sean P. O’Malley as permanent successor to
Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law, whose failures of leadership precipitated the
crisis in the first place. O’Malley had earned his spurs as a sex-scandal
cleanup man in Fall River, Mass. and Palm Beach. Equally important, he was a
Capuchin priest, a follower of St. Francis. It is safe to say that
throughout the church, and in the world at large, no Roman Catholic enjoys a
better public image than the friar from Assisi.

“A Bishop in Sandals is a Welcome Change,” ran
the headline on the New York Daily News editorial, which went on to
compare him invidiously to the local hierarch, Cardinal Edward Egan:
“O’Malley, brown tunic, sandals on his feet, openness in his demeanor, is
potentially Egan’s worst nightmare: A true priest, uncomfortable with phony
trappings of wealth, privilege or power, standing alongside a guy who lives
like a monarch and seems to have the impression that he is entitled to live
as if any past problems with these pedophile priests belong to someone else
and he is too important to be bothered by a demand from common Catholics for
answers or justice.”

In the National Catholic Reporter,Joe Feuerherd suggested
that O’Malley’s job description was the one St. Francis heard: “Go rebuild
my church which, as you can see, is falling to ruin.

Amidst dithyrambs of praise for O’Malley, about the only sour sound
came from former priest and retired psychology professor Eugene Kennedy, who
in a dyspeptic Religion News Service column professed to see the fine hand
of the departed Law in the Boston appointment. In Kennedy’s view, O’Malley
was a person “with proven pastoral and human graces” but also the latest in
a series of bishops to be plucked from a religious order to serve “as an
unshakable supporter of the pope’s program and interests.”

Machiavelli, a close observer of the papacy of his own
time, put it more unpleasantly. In his Discourses on Livy, he
credited the Franciscans (and Dominicans) with restoring the church by their
poverty and humility and good religious offices, which earned credibility
with the people while teaching them to leave it to God to punish any errors
committed by the church’s leaders. “So [the leaders] do the worst they can
because they do not fear the punishment that they do not see and do not
believe.”

After his appointment was announced, O’Malley
declared, “People’s lives are more important
than money.” The lives in question were, presumably, the 789 or so
children molested by at least 237 priests and 13 other church officials in
the Boston archdiocese since 1940, according to a report issued by the
Massachusetts Attorney General a few days before O’Malley’s formal
installation.